Demographic supply-demand imbalance in industrial structure in the super-aged nation Japan

BACKGROUND: Japan has a rapidly decreasing population, with ultra-low fertility and extremely fast aging. The rapid dynamics constitute a warning that change in the industrial structure may be unable to meet the changing pace of age-dependent demand. METHODS: The present study estimated the supply-demand imbalance by industrial sector, and we investigated the effectiveness of possible countermeasures. To quantify the demographic burden of different industry experts, we employed the dependency ratio to calculate the supply and demand of each industrial sector and occupation. RESULTS: We identified an expected excess of demand in the health-care sector; the growth in that deficiency is likely to continue until 2045, when the elderly population is likely to reach a peak. By contrast, oversupply is expected in the education and construction sectors. An overall shortage of full-time workers is likely to continue until 2050, when we predict that Japan will lack 3.1–9.3 million full-time workers to satisfy the baseline demand level. CONCLUSIONS: Considering that the imbalance is evident over different sectors, interministerial regulation of occupational choice may need to be imposed, e.g., by drastically changing student sizes in different area of higher education. Japan may have to decide to downgrade its social services and potentially consider increasing immigrant workers. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12976-018-0091-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.